Clichéd Love: A Satirical Romance

by Lynn Galli

  “For eight years,” Gayle relayed the length of time living together. Resignation still dripped from her voice. She probably thought he’d never propose.

  “Married for six years,” I said after checking my notes. Neither of them looked ecstatic with the arrangement anymore. Inertia and laziness probably kept them together more than love these days. “What was your wedding like?”

  “Oh, here we go. Strap in; she’ll never shut up about it.” Paul sighed and stopped a passing waiter, not ours, to place another drink order.

  Gayle donned a dreamy look. Uh-oh, Paul might be right about this. I glanced over at the bar and sighed to myself because my friends weren’t here. This was a touristy chain restaurant downtown. I’d much rather be listening to Riley and Adrian’s story with the chance to chat to Iris or Lane before the night ended. If my editor hadn’t blown out my eardrums with her screams of excitement over the competition angle to the story, I would have abandoned the premise. Instead, I’d signed up for double the amount of happily-ever-after stories.

  To hasten our exit, I went up to pay the bill at the hostess stand. Lingering to avoid meeting up with Gayle and Paul at the elevators, my eyes wandered the mall outside the chain restaurant. They snagged on Iris as she walked past the theater across the way. I blinked and gave a head wobble. It had to be wishful thinking screwing with my vision. Just the same, I darted out front to make sure.

  It was Iris. She was on her way to the down escalator of this multi-level upscale mall. What was Iris doing at Pacific Place? She didn’t like shopping, and her clothes lent themselves to department store over some of the designer shops in this place.

  Downstairs, she stepped into one of the stores. A second later, her face appeared in the window front. Ah, so she wasn’t here to shop. She was following someone and doing a good job of it. In attire set to blend with the other women here, she looked good lightly made up, hair wisps styled purposefully, shirt and trousers that both differentiated her look yet conformed to the trends in the mall. No cowboy boots tonight, which made sense. Black lace up flats that, if I had to guess, had rubber nonslip pads attached to help dampen any noise they made. The perfect getup to stay inconspicuous in a crowd of female shoppers at a high-end mall.

  I took the escalator down, caught between wanting to watch this play out and knowing I could blow her unassuming manner. With that as a possible outcome, I decided to continue on my way to the exit. Then her eyes landed on me in one of her sweeps of the area. She quirked her lips and tipped her head back once. I took that to mean that I should head over to say hello.

  She reached out and pulled me to her as soon as I entered the store. “Hey.”

  “Hi,” I matched her low tone. “Who’s your mark tonight?”

  Her eyes widened. “Should have known you’d see it.”

  I puffed up a smidge at her compliment. “Another insurance fraud guy?”

  “No, this one’s a cold case. I worked it seven years ago but couldn’t get the evidence I needed.”

  My eyebrows rose. “What do you think he did?”

  “Killed his ex-wife.”

  Breath pushed out audibly. This was a far cry from slip and fall fraud. Before I could say anything, her hand clasped mine and pulled me out into the mall. I didn’t have enough time to document the pleasant feel of her smooth hand before my attention focused on the guy starting toward the down escalator again. We followed, letting several people get on in front of us and moving onto the same step.

  She leaned closer and spoke. “His alibi was his new wife. It’s the only thing that kept us from getting an arrest. Everything else pointed to him. No more child support, no more shared custody, no more threats for full custody. He’d beaten her to within an inch of her life when they were married, but she never pressed charges. It was heartbreaking.”

  We got off at the next level and followed him around the escalator bank to the next set that took us down to the street level. A rather inconvenient layout for surveillance, but it forced people past more shops on their way down each flight.

  A hand squeeze stopped us when he window-shopped the Cartier store on the first floor. She maneuvered me against the railing that overlooked the ground floor, her back to him with me peeking over her shoulder. She placed a hand on the railing beside me and moved close. She smelled of lemongrass again. Something else, too, not quite powdery but something in that family. The fragrance was faint, not strong enough for a perfume or even a lotion. Scented soap, probably. After the long day and even longer story, I hoped I still smelled as pleasant as she did.

  “What else?” I figured if he did glance our way it would look less conspicuous if we kept talking. My heartbeat sped up again. This was even more interesting than taking photos of an insurance faker who was too stupid to know he was being set up.

  “The thing about murderers is that their stories usually hold up as long as they can tell it the way they want.” She fished out her phone and turned on the video camera, angling it to watch him behind her. “The minute you show up for more questions, all of a sudden it’s, ‘I told you everything the last time. I can’t help anymore. I think I should get a lawyer if you want to talk again.’ It’s almost always the suspect that trips himself up.” She paused when he moved to the next window, eyeing the display of engagement rings. “When you’ve got three good suspects, and two of them have no problem answering your questions, but the third gives a statement, then asks for an attorney, he’s almost always the guilty one.”

  My eyes shot to him again. “That’s this guy?”

  “To a T. What he doesn’t know is that his now second ex-wife no longer feels the need to protect him with the false alibi she came up with while they were married.”

  “How do you know?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. In the next moment, her hand was back in mine, tugging us into motion as he walked toward the exit. “Don’t judge me on this, but once a month I check the divorce records for the names of the suspects in all my unsolved cases.”

  “All right,” I said because I couldn’t think of what else to say. That was brilliant and tedious and obsessive and brilliant again.

  “Break a woman’s heart, and she’s no longer so protective of you.” She fluttered her eyebrows at me, making me wonder if she had plenty of experience with that. Judging from the comments some of the bar patrons made, she must have broken a few hearts in her lifetime. “We closed a few cases that way while I was still on the force. I left a handful of unsolveds when I retired. If you know anything about a detective, we can’t let those unsolved cases go.”

  “How many have you closed since you left?” This was giving me an idea for another article. Retired detectives who worked on unsolved cases after leaving the force. Might bring some notoriety to their quest to find the perpetrators.

  “Two so far. This would be my third.”

  My feet stopped moving. She’d only been retired for a year, and her PI duties were a full-time gig. “That’s incredible.”

  Her chin dipped at the compliment. “Not really. We aren’t given much time to follow leads to their conclusions on active cases. If nothing gets resolved in a few weeks, you have to start concentrating on another case. There’s never any overtime money to surveille the suspect unless you’ve got a tip that something is going to happen. When you retire, you finally have the time to follow anyone and everything for as long as you want. Sometimes you get lucky.”

  Up ahead, the guy raised his hand in a wave. Iris guided us across the street in between the standstill traffic, so we could watch this play out. He came up on a pretty, way too young for him, woman and leaned down to kiss her hello.

  “Not ex number two?” I guessed as we watched them clasp hands and enter the restaurant in front of them.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “What?” I took in her worried expression.

  “New girlfriend. It wasn’t long after he’d started an affair and gotten divorced to marry his second wi
fe that his first wife ends up murdered.”

  My eyes flicked back to the restaurant. Could the guy really be that stupid? He got away with the first murder, but if another ex-wife turns up murdered, he had to know he’d be the only suspect.

  “I’ll walk you back.”

  I was jerked out of my thoughts. “You don’t need to see what happens?”

  “I just wanted to confirm what his second ex-wife suspected. With that gander at the Cartier shop window, he’s possibly looking at another proposal.”

  Her meaning dawned on me. “Which would move up the timeframe on anything else he might be planning?”

  “You could have been a detective.” She winked and placed a hand on my back to turn us around.

  My shoulders lifted and dropped. “Don’t like guns.” Even if I went for extensive training, I wouldn’t be comfortable carrying one.

  She smiled in understanding. “That would be a problem.”

  “Not in the UK.”

  Now she was laughing. “Yes, okay. You could be a detective constable for the Met. No guns necessary.”

  “Or I could just write about people who use guns.”

  “Much better idea.” She squeezed her arm around my shoulders. “Keeps you here, anyway.”

  I warmed at her tone. It felt good to hear she wanted me to stick around as much as I was starting to feel like sticking around for a while.

  9 | Shawn & Wesley

  | Drew & Finn

  My eyes blinked and kept blinking as the story these women were telling me continued on. All four at once. My preference would have been two at a time, but they were all best friends and wouldn’t think of talking to me without the others. Not that I anticipated the story they were going to tell.

  “You all came out here together from Iowa?” All of them, together, like a migration pattern of lesbian, tattooed, pierced geese.

  “Shawn was the one who got offered the job first. We were together then, so I quit my job and came with her,” the one who wasn’t with Shawn anymore said.

  “Yeah, and I applied as soon as Shawn was offered a job because we worked at the same place back in Des Moines. Figured they’d probably want me, too,” Cocky, confident, zero humility told me.

  “And did they?” I had to ask.

  “Um, well, not there, but I did get a job with their competitor,” she said with the exact same confidence as if she’d turned down the unoffered job.

  “And I came out here with my partner,” the last one who wasn’t Shawn spoke up.

  I was having a hard time following who was the first and with whom. “You two were together back in Iowa?” I clarified, pointing to the two with opposing arm tattoos.

  “And we were together back then,” the other two with lip piercings said.

  Two couples in Iowa moved out to Seattle together. Maybe not so odd, except for the twist that only seems to happen in lesbian circles.

  “And now we’re together,” Lefty Tattoo said, gripping Stud Lip Piercing.

  “And we’re together,” Righty Tattoo said, matching the possessive pose with Hoop Lip Piercing.

  Yeah, they traveled almost two thousand miles to dump their partners for their best friends. All of them. Not just one of the couples breaking up because one of the partners had a thing for her best friend who was with their other best friend. No, they swapped partners. And one of them was pregnant at the time.

  “Okay.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say whenever I heard about women dating everyone in their group of friends because they somehow must feel there weren’t any other lesbians out there to date. One of my heterosexual friends once went after the ex-girlfriend of another friend of ours. Those guys still aren’t speaking to each other even after the one guy broke up with the ex-girlfriend. The dating carousal just didn’t happen as often in heterosexual circles.

  “So now we’re all one big happy family,” Hoop Piercing Wesley declared.

  Who have all seen each other naked and spent years in committed relationships that didn’t stay committed through a venue change. Yeah, happy family.

  “And you have the baby?”

  “She’s twenty-eight months now, but yes,” Left Tattoo Finn said. “Of course, Shawn is still her other mommy. She’s got three mommies and a stepmom.”

  “Wow.” What else could be said about someone who leaves a pregnant woman to get together with her best friend whose partner decides that she really always wanted the pregnant woman so it all worked out? Even with the baby, who was supposed to be brought up by pregnant mommy and her partner only now she’s got pregnant mommy and her new partner but still the old partner? I was confusing myself.

  “Do you think we’ll make your article?” Shawn, the quiet right tattoo, said.

  It was hard to say. As much as I would want everyone to read about their partner swap and baby raising quartet, it would be difficult to separate out these couples into two articles with two other heterosexual couples. “It’s up to my editor.” I happily passed on their impending disappointment to someone else.

  “How will we know?” Drew, the cocky stud piercing, asked.

  “You’ll have to read the paper or subscribe online.” Might as well get a few more customers for the paper out of this.

  They took turns shaking my hand and trying to needle me about being in the article but finally vacated. I was packing up when Iris took the seat next to me. I hadn’t seen her come in, which was surprising since I was facing the entrance.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” she began and tipped her chair back, a sly grin on her face. “We should move to Nebraska or someplace like that, find out we’re miserable together but too afraid to be alone, so we’ll take our best friends with us and couple up with them instead. Sound good?”

  I snorted and she laughed, pointing out that I snorted. “Judgey.”

  “Oh, please, you were wearing a flowy black robe and holding a gavel right with me.”

  I checked over both shoulders, spotting the foursome moving over to the pool tables with Riley and her crew. All were currently making more racket than the rest of the bar combined. “How do you know?”

  “Almost everyone in here thinks the same thing.”

  “How’d you get all this info?” I’d been meaning to ask her this for days now. A lot of people chatted with her in the bar, but it wasn’t long enough to get their entire stories. Certainly not as long as I’d been sitting with these couples to hear them.

  “Despite what you see in here, the Seattle lesbian community isn’t really that small.”

  I’d never thought it was, but the same faces were in here night after night.

  “With this as your base, you’re missing out on thousands of others.” She leaned close and spoke in a low voice. “Charlie’s rubbed some people the wrong way, and others just aren’t into the bar scene anymore.”

  Unlike her, who seemed to be into the bar scene every night. Or every night that I was here, at least. Even back when I was into the bar scene, I stayed home four nights a week. Then again, I didn’t have as much game as she did. Didn’t want to have as much game as she had.

  “Check out Green Lake on a Sunday afternoon,” she advised. “There’s an entire league of women playing softball. Almost all are lesbians. Or head to a Mariners game and find the section that hosts a revolving group of lesbian season ticket holders. Same with the women’s roller derby and soccer matches. Most of those women don’t come in here. If they hit a gay bar, it’s the trendier one a few blocks over. See what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, you’re saying that you stalk these women so you know their stories.”

  She snorted this time. “It’s like you’re a comedian.”

  “Without the obligatory vest, though, right?”

  “Right. You haven’t worn a vest once yet. Guess you’re not funny enough to become a comedian.”

  I leaned back, enjoying our banter. Several pairs of eyes flicked our way before glancing off again. Since I’d completed an
interview already, I should be spared requests to take down any other stories tonight. These glances weren’t checking if I wanted another interview. They showed hesitation at joining me with Iris there. It bothered me that I hadn’t pinned down the dynamic in here yet. Iris had left the bar with someone more often than not, but she never talked about leaving with that person. So if she didn’t brag about her conquests, why were so many people ready to warn me about her? I couldn’t believe she’d slept with everyone who warned me off her or even all the women I’d seen her go home with.

  I glanced at her and caught a curious stare. If she could read my mind, I’d blush, so I asked, “You following someone again tomorrow?”

  “You want me to follow you?” She held out her hand and ticked off each finger. “Gym, library, coffeehouse, library again, and back here to the bar.”

  A flush heated my cheeks. She’d been joking, but she had part of my days mapped out. “Just wanted to know if you’d had a break in your case.”

  “Listen to you, all mystery novel dialogue and all.” Her hand shoved against my shoulder.

  “I’ve been boning up.”

  “Very good.” Her face grew serious. “Possible break. Enough to pass on to my former protégé. She’ll follow-up, and fingers crossed, have an arrest soon.”

  “That’s great. Really, Iris, good work. You must feel proud.”

  Her face turned away, embarrassed by my compliment. “Like a weight has been lifted.” She looked back at me. “Want to celebrate by letting me kick your ass on a tennis court tomorrow again.”